She Wore Red
by Minor Ramblings
Summary: IceheartTarkin: Prompted by a discussion of "What's the creepiest pairing in the Star Wars Extended Universe that can be plausibly done?" The result? Ysanne Isard and Grand Moff Tarkin, playing at games of intrigue in Palpatine's court.


She wore red.

Red, the colour of passion, yet also of war. The promise of violence, constrained by the demure lines and delicate Ottegan silks of a debutante of Coruscant's highest social strata. 

But she was no maiden.

Too cool in her bearing, too confident with the tilt of her head, the angle of her jaw. Taking too much malicious pleasure, carefully restrained, in the unsettling effect her presence created amongst this gathering of the Empire's powerful. 

They called this the Mistresses' Ball.

_He_ had never hunted here. The women bored him, the groomed and cosseted livestock of a hundred scheming breeding programs, the excess daughters of the administration, shipped off to a marketplace no less base than Shaum Hi's cattle lots, despite the cultured tableau and overly-obsequious staff. Power was the coin exchanged, influence with a Moff purchased with the bodies of women. None of the men would marry any here tonight, despite the girlish fancies that trailed like mist clouds after them, mingled with the myriad perfumes scenting the air. Cattle, they were. Pretty, subservient, cultured and with any hint of independent thought most likely surgically removed to make room for their contraceptive implants.

The women coquetted; the men ventured desultory sallies now and again, the younger, foolish ones occasionally jostling for the eye of a favoured beauty. As intricate as any gavotte, this dance of manipulation and lust. Intricate, and unchanging too. He had watched it for years, the steps the same. And yet he never failed to appear at such galas. For information changed hands here too. 

Venturing a thin-lipped smile and the ghost of a nod for a favoured lackey, Grand Moff Tarkin returned from his musings to stand near a wall made isolated by his presence, cradling a wineglass in one hand, the gesture of such carefully studied casualness as to assure all watchers that he only adopted the mannerism, not the emotion itself. 

He returned to his unhurried study of the room, the people, and the woman in red.

So, no maiden she.

A disguise then, this splash of crimson amongst the shy rustles of retiring blues and apologetic greys and creams. Worn with faultless attention to detail, the woman schooled and raised to mingle effortlessly with just this sort of people. 

Certainly not camouflage, she made only the most cursory attempts to blend in, her striking features drawing admiring glances from the young, and wary ones from the elders, the ones who knew of her history, her position. Of her father, Sate Pestage, head of Imperial Intelligence.

Ysanne Isard.

Thirty, if she were a standard day. And yet mingling her mismatched eyes amongst frail blossoms of the Imperium a full decade her junior. But could it be disguise, when it shone so clearly from her who she was, and what she was, in the crimson danger lurking in her right eye, and the frigid calculation in her left?

Ah.

The garb of predator, not of prey. The sort he himself wore as a garment more permanent than the starched olive drab of his uniform. The camouflage of the hunter, hidden in plain sight, with her motives and manners hidden by the shock tactics of her apparel.

_What impulse drives you to take a part in this pantomime, red huntress? And who do you prey on tonight?_

****A/N** This is the first part of a story that was thought up by a friend and I thinking along the lines of "What would be the most disturbing pairing in the Star Wars extended universe, and can we make it plausible?" The answer we came up with? Iceheart/Tarkin. This isn't really romance so much as it is intrigue, and a pair of people playing each other in pursuit of power, so expect little to nothing in the way of fuzzies, and it's a hard piece for me to write, since I'm not often in the mood to think like either Isard or Tarkin, but I add a chapter here and there, so I may as well share them.**


End file.
